In many industries, a worker may not want any portion of a workpiece to contact any portion of his or her skin. This situation occurs in the chemical industry as well as in several other industries. For this reason, the art contains various examples of protective apparel, such as gloves, aprons, boots, pants, smocks, face shields, gowns and the like.
As more is known of various communicable diseases, more and more workers are using such protective garments in their work. Thus, it is not uncommon to find beauticians or other such workers wearing certain types of protective wearing apparel.
The most notable examples of the use of protective clothing are in the medical field. Thus, nearly all doctors wear some sort of protective apparel when working on a patient. It is not uncommon for even dentists to wear protective gloves, masks, gowns, smocks and pants while performing routine examinations and dental procedures. The use of such protection is not limited to doctors, for technicians, nurses, emergency personnel, dental hygienists, and veterinarians are but a few examples of those in the medical field who now commonly wear some sort of protective clothing while carrying out their work. This list is merely representative of the many workers who will benefit from the use of protective clothing, and many other types of workers will occur to those skilled in the art based on the teachings of this disclosure.
Of course, anyone involved in any way with laboratory work in many fields, especially the medical field, almost always wears some sort of protective clothing.
The surgeon and other operating room and hospital personnel are the most visible examples of medical personnel who wear protective clothing while working. Not only do such personnel wear protective clothing to protect a patient from contamination, with the advent of diseases such as hepatitis, AIDS and the like, many such medical workers wear protective clothing to protect themselves from contamination.
While the integrity of all such protective garments must be ensured, the surgical glove has received much attention in the art. One study has found that as much as fifty-nine percent of tested surgical gloves developed leaks when tested every fifteen minutes during surgery, and leakage occurred twenty-five percent of the time when two pairs of gloves were worn. This leakage is probably even higher for certain operations, such as in orthopaedic surgery, or the like. Any leakage of the surgical gloves can prove to be dangerous, and should be determined on a regular basis so the medical personnel can be warned upon the occurrence of such a breach.
Therefore, the art has included various procedures which are intended to protect the integrity of a worker's gloves, especially surgical gloves. These procedures have included requirements for a worker to change his gloves at a regular interval, or which require a worker to wear several pairs of gloves. Such procedures are not entirely successful because they interrupt the worker from his work and break his concentration. Furthermore, wearing several pairs of gloves may interfere with proper performance of the task. Even then, as the above-mentioned study found, the worker may not be fully protected.
Thus, the art has also included devices and systems which are intended to detect breaches in a worker's gloves. One such device requires the worker to immerse his gloved hands in a vat of electrolyte. However, this device also requires the worker to interrupt his task, move his hands to the vat, and immerse them in the electrolyte. Perhaps, the worker will have to wash his hands thoroughly before using this device to avoid contaminating the vat or the electrolyte, especially if the task may involve a contagious disease. This could be a clumsy and distracting requirement especially for a surgeon where time can be of the essence. Furthermore, the protection occurs only when the worker stops his task and tests the gloves. Breaches in the gloves may have occurred some time before the test, and thus exposed the worker to contamination during the time between the occurrence of the breach and the test. Due to the need to interrupt the work, many surgeons will simply delay testing their gloves until a convenient stopping place during the surgery has arisen thereby possibly increasing the risk of exposure. This is a problem in procedures requiring the surgeon to change gloves as well.
The device disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,321,925 is intended to continuously monitor a surgeon's gloves to warn of any perforations in those gloves. This device includes a contact on the patient, a contact on the surgeon, and an electrical path through the doctor's shoe, and through the operating room floor to and through the base of the operating table and to and through the table.
While this device overcomes some of the above-mentioned problems, it still has several drawbacks.
One drawback occurs because the electrical network which includes the signal means, the contacts, and the power source is not insulated for a portion thereof. Such uninsulated portion of the network includes the operating room floor, the operating table and the table base. Because of this, the characteristics of the circuit are not entirely and accurately predictable and may not be repeatable. For example, if there is a table base floor bolt that accidentally makes electrical contact with some other portion of the floor or room, the overall characteristics of the circuit can be changed enough so that the device which may have been sensitive enough to detect small leaks in the gloves during a particular operation will no longer be sensitive enough to detect such leaks. This situation may also occur if the doctor accidentally steps on some sort of insulating material and thus partially or totally insulates the bottom portion of the shoe heel that is intended to make contact with the floor. The device should therefore be calibrated before each operation, and even during the performance of a single operation to be sure that the desired sensitivity has not changed due to the occurrence of some event outside, or even inside, the operation.
Furthermore, this device is not adaptable to use in areas or environments outside of the specific operating room for which it was designed and calibrated. Thus, if an operation is to be performed on a gurney, or in the patient's bed, or even in a hallway or outside the hospital, such device may not operate in the manner intended. This is especially so in the case of ambulance personnel where operations are routinely carried out using supports that do not include an electrically conductive table which is connected to an electrically conductive floor by an electrically conductive base, all having electrical characteristics that are accounted for in a previously-conducted calibration procedure.
Still further, the patented device requires a specially designed shoe having a special heel. Many surgeons, or other medical personnel, may not wear such heeled shoes.
Still further, the patented device may be costly for several reasons. First, the operating room must be specially designed or retrofitted to use the device. Second, in may cases, once an item of clothing becomes contaminated, it is discarded. Should the special shoes of the patented device become contaminated, they may have to be replaced. Still further expense may be added if one of the elements of the network becomes contaminated, and must be replaced. Such replacement may require the entire network to be dismantled which can be time consuming as well as expensive. Spare parts may be difficult and costly to keep on hand, which is a drawback in an ambulance situation.
Still further, the patented device requires an electrically conductive floor which may not be desirable in some situations as some such floors may become slippery or may be uncomfortable.
Due to the requirement of a special shoe, the doctor may be required to change shoes before beginning a procedure. This may not be desirable, especially in an emergency situation.
While ensuring the integrity of a worker's gloves is quite important, due to the highly contagious and dangerous nature of many diseases and many chemicals, integrity monitoring of a worker's gloves alone may not be sufficient protection. In many situations, including a surgical operating room, any physical contact with the workpiece may prove to be dangerous.
Therefore, even beyond the drawbacks and problems mentioned for the known glove testers per se, they may have shortcomings in that they do not monitor all of the protective clothing being worn by a worker. Should that worker have a breach in is or her face mask, for example, such breach can be dangerous if the worker must bring his or her face in close proximity to a patient, for example to perform the work, as might be the case of an ambulance worker who must find and grasp a patient's tongue to prevent choking.
Therefore, there is a need for a system for continuously monitoring protective clothing to detect any breach in such clothing immediately upon occurrence of such breach, and which can be used to monitor all of the protective clothing worn by a worker, and which is adaptable to a wide variety of situations and environments, does not require the worker to stop work to check the integrity of the clothing, yet which provides repeatable, accurate results and which is easily transported and stored, and which is easily adjusted, donned and is still inexpensive.